The quality of the budget smartphone is improving gradually with the launch of each successive smartphones in the industry. Just like flagship smartphones, they’re fast, well designed, and offer a ton of extra features as well. One of the prime examples is the Honor’s latest budget smartphone dubbed as Holly 4. Honor has added yet another budget device under its portfolio, offering better battery backup and camera functionalities. The Honor Holly 4 carries impressive specs for a phone at this price point.
Coming to the build quality, the Honor Holly 4 is quite impressive with a metal unibody design with the premium look and feel. The Holly 4 is sturdy, feels compact in hand, comfortable to hold and offers good grip as it has curvy back. The rear of the device features a single tone metallic finish housing rear camera with flash and fingerprint scanner. We like the design language of this device at this price point.
The Honor Holly 4 sports a 5-inch (1280 x 720 pixels) HD display with no information about the Corning Gorilla Glass protection. Surprisingly, the display looks vibrant, offers good color output and viewing angles as well. The sunlight legibility is good too. However, we wish Honor had used any protective layer on top to avoid display scratches and cracks.
Moving on to the performance, the Honor Holly 4 is powered by an Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 64-bit Mobile Platform with Adreno 505 taking care of Graphics department. When it comes to casual day-to-day usage, the smartphone works well and smooth without any lag. Moreover, the Holly 4 handles games very well without any frame drop, which is a rare sight indeed. As we engaged in gaming, we didn’t observe any heating issues as well. This processor has been tested already and does not disappoint you on a day-to-day usage.
The Honor Holly 4 comes with a 13MP rear camera with LED Flash and also capable of recording 1080p videos. The front is taken care of 5MP selfie shooter. Talking about the real world usage, the images under proper daylight condition looks good with good amount of details. The autofocus is quick to lock the subject as well. The selfie camera suffices for good quality video calling and social media worthy shots too. It also has a beauty mode that removes the blemishes on the skin, making selfie a perfect one.
The Honor Holly 4 runs on Android 7.0 (Nougat) with EMUI 5.1 on top. In general, the EMUI is quite simple to use and offers lots of customization options for the users including home screen style, fingerprint gesture and more. It also allows the user to change the navigation keys as per their preference. It also has a Phone Manager app, that takes care of all the optimization process for your device. Overall, the EMUI is smooth to use and fun to experiment with.
Another USP of the Honor Holly 4 is its 3020mAh (typical) battery. During our casual usage, it almost lasts up to 1 and half days on normal usage that includes video streaming, Calls, and browsing the Internet. On heavy usage, it comfortably lasts one full day, which is amazing for a smartphone at this price point. The only let down here is the lack of fast charging, as it takes good 2 hours to charge fully.
In a nutshell, the Honor Holly 4 is a serious contender with amazing build quality, long-lasting battery life, and a good camera. It has all the things in the right amount to compete in the price-sensitive Indian market. The Honor Holly 4 comes in Grey, Gold and Silver colors, is priced at Rs. 11,999 (MOP) and is available across all Honor partner stores across India.